Wednesday, December 12, 2012

On the weekend, as part of Little B’s advent calendar
we took a canoe trip down the Yarra River to Herring Island.

There were so many things and people to see as we
canoed along. I loved looking at all the old boat houses, and cactus walls.
Little B loved all the baby ducklings and saying hello to everyone we “met”.

Sometimes, you need to just lie down for a little rest
(hmmm mainly I would think only if you actually did the paddling rather than
socialising LOL).

Originally created with silt dredged from the river, Herring Island passed through many hands (including the Scouts) until it became part of
Parks Victoria in 1994, and is now an Environmental Sculpture Park. It’s also
the home of a Summer Arts festival from January to April each year.

After a picnic lunch from our trusty esky, we did a
walk around the island and checked out all the sculptures. Little B loved the “giant
pinecone” and a falling fence to nowhere :-)

We’ve found a good travelling picnic lunch for
canoeing is tombolas for Mr B and Little B and a sandwich for me, some fruit
and a nutrient dense home-made slice or biscuit. Mr B’s current fave is bring
along some home-made ginger beer (since he’s the muscles in our paddling).

On a side note, Mr B and I could not get over how
dirty the Yarra River was. We canoed it a looong time ago (about 7 years ago)
and it was dirty then but the level of pollution in it and the smell was
disgusting. It dismayed us both over how much rubbish was floating in there. We always pick up rubbish from wherever we canoe following the Take 3 Clean Beach Principle (though in our case it is generally lakes and rivers). Little B does it naturally now though he is still saddened and doesnt understand why people leave it there in the first place.

Neither do I love, neither do I. All we can do is make the best difference we can. I wish more people did it though.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Two years ago, with Granny B’s help I made a fabric
advent calendar for Little B. Mainly to help him track the time until Christmas
(and his birthday which is not long after) and not only was it fun to make but an absolute hit with Little B. It’s
always been part home-made, part craft, part cooking and part experiences.

And it's these things the he remembers and talks about when thinking about Christmas. Inadvertently these have now become family traditions :-)

But this year I’ve taken a leaf (excuse the pun) out
of Tricia’s book over at Little Eco Footprints and made a leaf advent calendar.
For three reasons, 1) it takes up minimal space, 2) I like the notion of using
things we have in the yard and 3) Little B was very attracted to the novelty of
the whole thing. Our normal advent calendar has just stayed packed away and we
will probably use it again next year.

But as with all traditions, my little boy has gotten bigger and some activities have lost their gloss.

So this our list for this year (taking into account one very science-y, outdoor, active type of boy – read less cooking):

Sunday, December 2, 2012

NOURISH: I spent a weekend cooking all the snacks
that Little B would need for kindy until the end of the year and froze them.
Now I just get out what we need the night before and it’s defrosted in time for
his lunch. I’ve also bulk cooked a few meals, so that on really busy or hot
nights we can grab something and heat it up in the microwave.

PREPARE: I finished off as much of
our Christmas presents as possible. I made a batch of strawberry jam to give as
gifts to give to teachers, Little B’s physiotherapist and OT, and some
neighbours.

Those I
didn’t make, I bought from Etsy and MadeIt. I’ve also been adding to our
stockpile so I don’t have to go to the shops as much during the Christmas
period (I hate crowds!!).

REDUCE: Repurposed a whole bunch of
star pickets and old bamboo to support my tomato plants. The one benefit I
guess of a buying a house with a crazy wild backyard (it was FULL of star
pickets just stuck in the ground in any old place). Used up all Granny B’s old
stocking socks on tying up said tomato plants as well.

GREEN: Nothing new to report here,
just moseying along with all our current green living choices.

GROW: It’s all going on in the garden at the
moment – lots and lots of zucchinis, the almond tree is full and our apples
look beautiful. Our tomato plants have baby tomatoes, the bean seedlings are
shooting up, our potatoes are flowering and our pumpkins are trying to take
over the world :-)

CREATE: This month I made another
teepee as a gift (pics to come), bunting for Christmas and a scarf for family
overseas. I also made our Christmas wreath out of sticks in the backyard and
crocheted a few Christmas decorations for our tree.

DISCOVER:I’ve jumped back into reading again this
month. I enjoyed Whole Larder Love by Rohan Anderson for it’s preserving
section. I’m looking forward to making semi dried tomatoes (we are growing one
kind of tomato specifically for this), hot zucchini relish and blood plum jam.
I’ve also read In the Defense of Food by Michael Pollan. I originally read an
abridged copy of this but it was good to read it all in total.

For fun,
I read Love Anthony by Lisa Genova (it brought tears to my eyes), and roared
through The Twelve by Juston Cronin (fantastic reading – I literally almost
couldn’t put it down and probably wouldnt have, if I didnt have to do annoying things like cook, sleep, look after my family ;-).

ENHANCE: Aah its coming to end of the
kinder year – I’ve helped at AGM’s, and strategy meetings. Mr B and I put up
signs at the kinder to help get rid of some unsavoury people boozing away the
evenings in a preschool’s car park – noice!!.

ENJOY: This month we enjoyed a holiday break at Phillip Island. It was great to take some time out and away and just
switch off from it all – no phones, no computers – just sun, sand and
exploration before Mr B had to go away overseas for work for a week or so.

Monday, November 26, 2012

This year will be our first Christmas in our new house
as well as our first Christmas with our own Christmassy things. After losing everything
from the old house, we celebrated the last two Christmases at Granny B’s and
decorated/celebrated with things we either made or decorations Granny B already
owned.

Luckily for us, last year we were gifted a handful of
decorations from family members. These things were given with our green beliefs
in mind (one of these angels, and some handmade gnomes on reindeer). But this year I
wanted a wreath to hang on the door.

In an old (2008) Burke’s Backyard magazine, I found a
simple how to guide to making your own wreath. Then I spent 20 minutes picking
up a variety of sticks from our backyard before sitting down with an old coat
hanger and a hot glue gun. And voila, we have our own Christmas wreath to hang
on the door.

I love the front cover of Country Style magazine at
the moment with their feather wreath (not the bird though), so we think we may weave a few feathers
from Little B’s nature collection into our wreath before we hang it up. I also
want to cover the hanger in white wool, so it blends in a bit more with our
white door.

And what has surprised me is that I really feel a
unexplainable happiness that I made this wreath from simple things already in
our backyard. I guess sometimes it’s the simple things that give us the
greatest pleasure?? :-)

Sunday, November 25, 2012

One of our favourite places we visited on our recent
holiday was the Inverloch Shell Museum. It is a community museum with over 6000
shells in display. Little B loves everything to do with the ocean and has quite
the shell collection himself, so this was a must do for us, but I think most
people would find it interesting as well.

The museum cost $5 entry for a family and is made up
of collection of shells, crabs and even preserved octopuses. The sheer variety
of shells was mind boggling as was the size of some of them. In different
corners they have touch tables, where you can touch different shells as well as
things like starfishes, and fish bladders.

It is set within the Bunurong Environment Centre,
which also had other really interesting free displays. Firstly a dinosaur
display provided by Monash University, which allows children to dig for
fossils, do dinosaur puzzles and watch the history of dinosaur discoveries in
the South Gippsland area.

Secondly more hands on displays about the forests and
the seas. Little B loved a faux forest floor where you could search for
different objects with tweezers and a magnifying glass.

This area allowed children to put shells into
alphabetical order, or draw pictures to add to a collage of the foreshore. It
was also really interesting for Granny B and I as it talked about all the
environmental conservation measures the local community had taken to eradicate the marine pest, the Northern Pacific Seastar (they removed them all by hand over a 2 year period).

Little B absolutely loved the hands on nature of these displays,
especially being able to touch shells and starfishes. He hopes to go there again "really soon" :-)

Sunday, November 18, 2012

There’s nothing like a dead computer to give you an
enforced break :-) Lucky for me it happened just before we went on holidays to
Phillip Island. Change of place and things to do make for great distractions!!

We also were lucky with the weather – while nowhere
near hot, it was sunny and mild and we had zero rain throughout the duration of
our holiday!! The house we hired turned out to be delightful and a great base
too.

:: Lots of mini golf was played. Little B loves to
play golf, and really who could resists pirate mini golf around a pirate ship
or as a mini-inventor, mini golf around a mechanical invention track??

:: Beach babies abound in our family, so we spent lots
and lots of time at the beach building castles, looking in rockpools, walking
and flying kites.

:: Our beloved canoe came with us too. Not as much fun
as we hoped, but Mr B and Little B stuck almost up to their knees in mud on the
foreshore was priceless (and hilarious). Not so hilarious were the muddy shoes
or clothes that I got to wash (those shoes above are light pale mauve).

:: We spent time checking out the mangrove walks
around Rhyll as Little B loves everything ocean related. I fell in love with
their composting loo system and aim to put one in as our second toilet when we
extend (and I now have Mr B onside).

:: we spent some time in Inverloch investigating their
Shell Museum (another post on this coming up)

:: The final highlight was visiting the museum at the
Grand Prix Race Circuit. When he was much younger Mr B was an amateur motorcycle
racer and had raced at Phillip Island. My dad was into racing cars and I grew up at the drag races in Adelaide.
So it was nice to share these different things about ourselves and our
childhoods with Little B where he could put it all in context.

And now we are back - well rested, sunned up a bit (it's of course cold and wet at home at the moment *sigh*) and ready to tackle are garden just that little bit more.

Saturday, November 3, 2012

NOURISH: Our favourite bickies at the moment have to
be these jammy oat biscuits courtesy of Jude Blereau. I’ve also discovered you
can freeze them and then warm them back up in the oven without any difference
in taste or texture.

I've also been cooking lots for our canoeing expeditions - easy to eat hand held food like tombolas, gozlemes, the above biscuits, roast vegie tarts. Things that are easy to bulk cook and then defrost or reheat and take in our little thermos jars.

PREPARE: Not food per se but I've been getting ready for Christmas. Working off a detailed list I've been slowly making or buying hand made goodies for family.

REDUCE: Using Mr B’s old socks for
sewing projects (see below).

GREEN: I’ve started using aloe vera
as a hair product on my hair. Since having Little B my hair wants to be curly
but looks more like I stuck my finger in a light socket LOL. After reading
about aloe vera, I gave it a try with great results. My hair is so soft and
when it air dries it goes into a soft soft curl.

I’ve
also been trialing a home-made sugar wax recipe from Plastic Free by Beth Terry
for my legs to avoid using razors. So far so good – though very messy. I’m
hoping I’ll get better at it each time.

GROW: Our potatoes are growing like crazy and our
zucchini, squash and pumpkin seedlings are doing really well in the ground too.
Our tomatoes are not so spectacular but since you shouldn’t plant them out
until Cup Day around here, fingers crossed they start doing better soon.

We have
loads of baby apples and nectarines on the trees too (the benefits of buying a
house with established fruit trees though the nectarine is hideously affected
by leaf curl). And the almond tree is full as well.

CREATE: This month I made a
spider costumer for Little B out of Mr B’s old socks. They have just the right
kink for legs and then finger knitted cords to join them with his black tshirt.
I then sewed cardboard eyes onto his black beanie. It was a total hit and I
spend a lot of my time with said spider these days :-)

DISCOVER:I’ve taken a rest from heavy reading
this month. Interesting reads have been Goodbye for Now by Laurie Frankel (a
novel look at “life” after death) and The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.
I’m currently ensconced in the sequel to The Passage, The Twelve by Justin
Cronin.

ENHANCE: Mr B and I have actually
been cutting back on our outside commitments to spend more time at home as a
family. Instead we have focused on ensuring that we buy local when we can and
support local businesses.

ENJOY: We loved going to the Stringybark Sustainable Living Festival again this year. It is such a great place to go as a family, to see and hang out with like minded people. So many native animals to see and chat about. Little B met Dirt Girl, and they had an amazing nocturnal nightwalk set up inside. I also loved that they had stands for the kids to make Seed Bombs.

The Planks above were a huge hit with Little B. This stand spread across multiple areas and attracted kids and adults alike like bees to honey. We spent about 20 minutes sitting on the floor building. Made from sustainable wood, we now know what Little B is getting for Christmas :-)

We’ve been having so much fun
as a family at the moment. Mr B and I
have designated one day each weekend that we devote to going out into nature as
a family. Mainly we have been canoeing, bush walking and “exploring” as Little
B puts it, but it’s been so much fun.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

With both our solar arrays connected, it was only a
matter of time before we started to compare the two. Over the last few weeks,
we’ve had some beautiful sunny days (in amongst the throwback to winter *sigh*),
so we’ve started noting down what each array was doing.

We have 1kw array of flat panels on our roof.

And a 1kw solar tracker.

Our block is oriented east to west (not the best), so
our flat panels receive most of their sun in the afternoon from the west. Our
solar tracker obviously tracks the sun from whenever the sun first hits the
panels (8.45am) until sundown.

On our best day last week, our flat panels generated 4.69
kwh. BUT our solar tracker generated 8kwh. I was very chuffed to say the least.
First of all, because we generated nearly 13kwh that day and we only use 6kwh on our
worst days. I’m not that much into feeding back into the grid (though Mr B is).
In my mind, as long as we make more than we use, I’m happy :-)

But secondly, because the solar tracker was so much
more effective than the flat panels. And now this is where I must divulge that Mr
B has been working in solar & sustainability measures for the last 8 years.
He was so enamoured by different solar farms that he saw in Germany and Spain
about 4 years ago, that he came to Australia with the dream of building solar
trackers.

And so it began, working in our garage and in our
study. He has mainly worked rurally in Victoria getting his dream up off the
ground. Working with farmers, vineyards and small city councils. The biggest solar tracker he built has been for Wangaratta City Council.

So we have always wanted one in our own yard but with
all our housing issues over the last few years, it just hasn’t been possible.
But now we have one in all its glory (yes I’m biased LOL) and I am so proud of
my dear hubby that it lives up to all its promise.